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Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT)

Dept. of Computer Science (DCS)

Grad Dip IT (eScience)

COMP6701 eScience Project

Semester 1/2 2007

Course co-ordinator: none currently allocated for semester 2

Background and Structure

The Graduate Diploma in Information Technology (eScience) aims to take students who have a prior qualification in the sciences or engineering and give them enough training and experience in information technology to qualify them to apply for a job in the IT industry.

Starting from Semester 2, 2003, the individual eScience project, COMP6701, has been reduced to be a 6 unit course (down from 12 units). Because it is a smaller project, the project outcome will be expected to be less than previous projects. The main outcomes from the new version of COMP6701 will be for students to demonstrate that the following "exit skills":

• a reasonable level of competency in programming in a modern object oriented language, and
• ability to take a problem statement and to plan a project and design and implement software to solve that problem, and
• ability to write a report which is of an acceptable level of professionalism.

The new COMP6701 projects will start by being reasonably well defined. They will probably not cover all of the phases of the software development cycle. They might be closely connected with another eScience project which has run in the past, is running now, or might be run in the future. For example, the project could look something like the following:

• It might be a "scooping level" project which will be largely concentrated on the requirements of a new piece of software. Such a project would produce a detailed requirements analysis as well as a small number of software prototypes.
• It might be an "implementation level" project, where a detailed set of requirements will be taken and converted to code. Such a project will need to include testing of the implemented software.
• It might be an "extension level" project which takes another piece of software and extends it in some way.
• It might be a "testing and fixing" level project which takes a piece of software which does not work very well and fixes it up. Probably combined with an extension level project as well.

Then again, your COMP6701 project might look different to all of the above. However it looks, it should take roughly 150-170 hours of work and it should allow you to demonstrate that you have the required exit skills for the Graduate Diploma in IT (eScience).

Assessment

The project's scope and assessment conditions will be specified in an 'Independent Study Contract' negotiated and signed by the student, their supervisor and the project co-ordinator at the early stages of the semester. Unless otherwise specified in the Contract, the following scheme will be used.

The assessment will be based on the software that you have written as well as your final report. There will also be a small amount of marks based on an oral presentation/demonstration of your software.All of these deliverables will be due at the end of the project - but start working on them early. At least two examiners will be involved in reading your reports and evaluating your software.

Evaluated aspect	Deliverable	Weighting
Manager Side	Timetable, Initial Presentation, Notebook Final presentation, Meeting participation	10.00%
Developer Side	Evidence of good project management Software description and modelling Presentation of written thesis Technical competence General feeling Code	50.00%
User Side	Software Documentation/Users Guide/Help Feedback from the client	40.00%

The timetable is the one you will present both during your initial presentation (planning) at the beginning of February (date still to be fixed) and in your report (explaining how you did and did not meet your own deadline).

Your Notebook should contain your personal notes, reflections, trick that you find during the development of your project.

What the assessment means

The grade you receive can be interpreted as follows

• Fail (<50%): Bad news. You should NOT expect to fail your project. You will have been advised not to undertake a project if there is a significant risk of failing. A fail grade reflects a major non-delivery of your software or report or extreme sloppiness with either.

• High Distinction (>80%): This is an excellent result and basically means that your work has demonstrated deep learning. Very few students will achieve a High Distinction in this project course.

• Pass/Credit (50-69%): If you take a reasonably well defined project and achieve most of its requirements and write it up in a reasonable way then you can expect to get a Pass or Credit grade for it. (A mid-high Credit is quite good. A bare Pass speaks for itself.)

• Distinction (70-79%): This is a very good result. A Distinction level project will need to have high quality software and a well written report as well as displaying a good amount of inspiration and problem solving.

The report

(see the corresponding section for COMP6703)

Suggested Organisation of the work

(see the corresponding section for COMP6703)

Project topics

(see the corresponding section for COMP6703)

Supervision

(see the corresponding section for COMP6703)

Possible timetable

(see the corresponding section for COMP6703)